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Ingeborg Bachmann

Biography

Ingeborg Bachmann is perhaps the most famous female author in the contemporary German-speaking world, famed as much for her troubled personal life as for her sublime and stirring writing. In 1926, Bachmann was born in Klagenfurt in Carinthia, a former Duchy of the Holy Roman Empire and later one of the ‘crown lands’ of Austria-Hungary. Its complicated history and geography (it shares borders - at times disputed - with Italy and Slovenia) inform Bachmann’s writing. Her prose, in particular, incisively reflects on the meaning of a national identity entangled with the arbitrary systems of politics and geography and yet in many ways transcending them. Her cosmopolitan interest in language and other cultures infuses her works, littered with foreign expressions (especially the short-story ‘Simultan’ [1972]), figures (such as Ivan in Malina [1971]) and settings (for example, Egypt in Das Buch Franza [1978]). Bachmann herself travelled widely, visiting Poland and Egypt (amongst the most significant trips for her writing) and living in Vienna, Berlin, Zürich and Rome, where she died in 1973.

As with many of the great post-1945 German-language writers, the influence of National Socialism and the Second World War on Bachmann’s writing cannot be denied. In an interview with Gerda Bödefeld in 1971 (reprinted in Wir müssen wahre Sätze finden, 1983), Bachmann claimed that her childhood had been destroyed when Hitler’s troops marched into Klagenfurt in April 1938. Her sparse diaries from the period, published recently as Kriegstagebuch (War Diary [2010]) attest to the defining influence of this period, especially as far as Bachmann’s critical stance towards violence and suffering are concerned. This can be discerned in a story written during the war Das Honditschkreuz (The Cross of Honditsch [ca. 1943]; reprinted in Werke, vol 4) but not published until after Bachmann’s death. Immediately after the war, Bachmann’s sensibility towards these issues was developed in conversation with the British soldier Jack Hamesh, a Viennese Jew who escaped Austria on a Kindertransport. He introduced her to aspects of German and Austrian culture suppressed by the Nazis. Their relationship represented a prelude to Bachmann’s confrontation with the dark side of Austrian history. Her personal and creative engagement with the past was intensified by the fact of her father’s NSDAP membership.

In 1945, Bachmann enrolled at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Innsbruck, continuing her studies later in Graz and from 1946 in Vienna, where she was awarded a doctorate in 1950. Her dissertation treated the critical reception of Martin Heidegger’s existential philosophy. During this period several Kafkaesque short stories appeared in the Wiener Tageszeitung, including Im Himmel und auf Erden (In Heaven and on Earth [29 May 1949]), Das Lächeln der Sphinx (The Laugh of the Sphinx [25 September 1949]), Die Karawane und die Auferstehung (The Caravan and the Resurrection [25 December 1949]), all reprinted in Werke, vol. 4 edited by Koschel, von Weidenbaum and Münster. Fragments from a difficult uncompleted novel, Der Stadt hinter dem Strom, also date from this period.

After graduating, Bachmann began working for various Allied radio broadcasters, initially writing for the news and features section of the ‘Red-White-Red’ network, managed by the American occupation authorities, before moving into its script department, eventually writing her own radio plays. The first to be broadcast, Ein Geschäft mit Träumen (A Business with Dreams [1952]), has to do with the suppression of individual desire in the public world of capitalism. Bachmann engages more critically with the idea of escape in Die Zikaden (The Cicadas [1952]), which reworks a story told by Socrates in the Phaedrus about the mystical song of the cicadas, once humans charmed into forfeiting all life for their art. Without food, drink or sleep, they lost all humanity. Their song tempts others to do the same. In Bachmann’s play, this myth evokes the dangers of retreating into the world of art and turning one’s back on the social world, a message that would resound in the socially engaged literature of the post-war period. In Bachmann’s best known radio play, Der Gute Gott von Manhattan (The Good God of Manhattan [1958]), absolute love represents a refuge for the individual, an ecstatic state in which he or she can achieve ultimate gratification and in which the rest of the world no longer seems to matter. Such romantic fulfillment thus disrupts a social order that requires the subordination of the individual to economic and political ends. In this play, the female lover, Jennifer, is murdered by the Good God who seeks to eliminate all lovers in the city of New York, the centre of the consumerist world. Her partner, Jan, escapes this fate because he has begun to withdraw from the relationship; when the Good God strikes, he is sitting in a bar. Here we see Bachmann’s concern with gender relations begin to crystallize. She senses that while women are taught to sacrifice everything in romantic relationships, men are incapable of absolute love and selfless actions. Her depiction of the destructiveness of male-female relationships would inspire a generation of feminists who were particularly inspired by the novel Malina (Malina [1971]) and the fragmentary Das Buch Franza (The Book of Franza). In 1959, the Good God of Manhattan was awarded the radio prize of the war blind. Bachmann’s acceptance speech reiterates her conviction that the author must not deny or obscure pain and suffering but acknowledge it, ‘damit wir sehen können’ (so that we can see, Werke, 4, p. 275).

Bachmann first came to the attention of the literary establishment through her poetry. In May 1953, she was awarded the prestigious prize of the Gruppe 47, a group of influential writers and publishers. Her first volume of poetry, Die Gestundete Zeit (Time Deferred [1953]) followed in December that year. The modernist influence on her highly symbolic poetry cannot be missed. The spectre of a dark past and the threatening Cold War present loom over the verses which conjure up images of death, destruction and emptiness. The rejection of conventional poetic forms and rhyme evokes the collapse of the social and linguistic order. Where traditional poetic imagery appears, it is immediately subverted, as in ‘Früher Mittag’, which first describes early summer, a verdant lime tree and gushing fountains and then, half way through the first verse, the tattered wings of an abused phoenix and a disfigured hand reaching into a cornfield. The words ‘sieben Jahre später,/ in einem Totenhaus,/ trinken die Henker von gestern / den goldenen Becher aus’ (seven years later, / in the house of the dead, / the hangmen of yesteryear drink / from golden chalices) remind the reader that it is no longer possible to remember Germany’s lyrical heritage without also remembering its crimes. There are, however, utopian notes in her poetry, despite its admonition to remember and act responsibly. In a cover story (ground breaking not only because it treated poetry but a female poet), the German weekly Der Spiegel (18 August 1954) aligned Bachmann with her poetic colleagues across Europe: she symbolized Germany’s rebirth into an international literary culture. Scholars have pinpointed this news story as the birth of the Bachmann myth: her almost symbolic status in post-1945 culture, as much for her person as for her literature (Monika Albrecht, 2004). Alongside Paul Celan, with whom she commenced a passionate and tragic relationship in 1948, she became one of the most acclaimed and iconic poets of post-war Germany. Their literary dialogue can be discerned in Celan’s Mohn und Gedächtnis and Bachmann’s Die Gestundene Zeit and (Poppy and Memory [1952]) as well as her novel Malina, which bears traces of her profound grief at Celan’s suicide in 1970. Monika Albrecht (1992) also sees in Malina Bachmann’s response to the novel Mein Name sei Gantenbein (Let My Name be Gantenbein [1964]), which she perceived as a plagiarism of her character by her former partner, Max Frisch.

By the time that Bachmann published her first novel, she had grown disillusioned with poetry, doubting its social relevance in an age of impending nuclear war and political turmoil. The poem ‘Kein Delikatessen’ (No Delicacies) articulates her scepticism. It was published in the famous fifteenth edition of the left-wing journal Kursbuch (Course Book [November 1968]) proclaiming the death of literature. The fact that Bachmann continued to write poetry in private, as a means to come to terms with her personal anxiety (see Àine McMurtry, 2012) is perhaps unsurprising given the author’s paradoxical decision to announce her effective ‘retirement’ from poetry through the vehicle of poetry. These personal poems (unintended for publication and unfinished) have since been published in the collections Letzte, unveröffentlichte Gedichte (Last, Unpublished Poems, 1998) and Ich weiß keine bessere Welt (I know no Better World, 2000).

In comparison to most of her early short stories, the tales in Bachmann’s first prose volume, Das dreißigste Jahr (The Thirtieth Year [1961]), can be related to a definite time and society. ‘Jugend in einer österreichischen Stadt’ (Youth in an Austrian Town’) and ‘Unter Mördern und Irren’ (‘Amongst Murderers and Madmen’) look back on National Socialism and consider its legacy in a society all too eager to forget. The literary establishment was nonplussed about Bachmann’s first concerted forays into prose writing, sometimes regarded as a disappointing descent from the supposedly abstract beauty of her poetry to the petty concerns of ‘women’s writing’. Stories like ‘Das dreißigste Jahr’, ‘Alles’ (Everything) and ‘Ein Schritt nach Gomorrah’ (A Step towards Gomorrah) develop the themes of disappointed love, alienation, loneliness and desperation and circle around unfulfilling relationships. They nevertheless imagine utopian moments, new possibilities for the individual as well as social worlds structured in different ways. Struggling female figures dominate all the stories in Simultan (Simultaneous, 1972).

The feminist reception of Bachmann’s writing (albeit delayed) was inspired by the profound suffering of her female protagonists, especially in the uncompleted novel cycle Todesarten (Ways of Dying), comprising the novel fragments Das Buch Franza and Requiem für Fanny Goldmann (Requiem for Fanny Goldmann), both published in uncompleted form in 1979. In 1995, Dirk Göttsche, Monika Albrecht and Robert Pichl published a critical edition outlining the development of the Todesarten novels, on which Bachmann worked from around 1962 until her premature death in 1973. Bachmann’s only completed novel, Malina, is a modernist masterpiece: supremely ambiguous, puzzling, thought-provoking yet deeply moving. There is no plot as such in this highly experimental novel which unfolds in the endlessly deferred present until the last line: ‘es war Mord’ (it was murder). These words mark the destruction of the female Ich (I), who struggles to survive in a society that she perceives as an unremitting assault on her subjectivity. At the close of the novel, the Ich disappears into a crack in the wall as Malina, the enigmatic double with whom she shares her home, eliminates all traces of her. This novel unites the themes that emerged in her earlier writing. The ecstatic and liberating possibilities of absolute love are paired with a rousing depiction of romantic disappointment and hints of a deep scepticism about the male capacity for absolute love. The symbolic plane of the novel, at least, operates according to a series of gendered ideas that constantly clash: intuition, emotion, spontaneity, embodied in the narrating female Ich, appear incompatible with the dominant values of reason, composure and logic, represented by Malina and also Ivan, the lover of the Ich. The ambiguous death of the Ich stages the repressive mechanisms of a society without a conscience, a society that privileges self-interest and ‘progress’ above all else, a society driven by the destructive Enlightenment rationality described by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkeimer in the seminal Dialektik der Aufklärung (1947). As feminist critics would argue, the death of the Ich (read as murder) represents the tragedy of femininity in patriarchal society. The novel does not end on an unambiguously negative note, however. As with all Bachmann’s writing, there is something hopeful about the conclusion, when the female narrator disappears into a crack in the wall. This fissure remains visible, a reminder of the violence that society tries to repress. That it is not sealed suggests that the Ich may one day re-emerge, when the world is no longer hostile to her desires.

On 25 September 1973, Ingeborg Bachmann was seriously injured by a fire in her Rome apartment. She was hospitalized but perished weeks later, on 17 October, allegedly as a result of complications caused by her abuse of barbiturates and the subsequent withdrawal symptoms. If Bachmann has (like many great female writers) become somewhat of a mythical figure in the popular imagination, it is in no small part due to the manner of her death, combined with her troubled personal life. Her true legacies, however, are her writing and the moral imperatives it powerfully conveys.